![]() Paul Rand: What does it mean to belong in America? Who gets included in society and who gets excluded? How do we find meaning in this experience? These are questions that Berlant has been asking her entire life. On this episode, Lauren Berlant and the cruel optimism of the good life. Paul Rand: From the University of Chicago, this is Big Brains, a podcast about pioneering research and pivotal breakthroughs that are reshaping our world. Lauren Berlant: Insofar as I work with art and work with theory, my interest is in trying to produce better ways of thinking about what a good life would be that didn't depend on achievement and success and these kinds of very, kind of beef-jerky-like models of how people live. ![]() But she wants to find a way to reshape things. Paul Rand: Berlant says that our society and individual sense of place in the world have been shattered in the last few decades. Lauren Berlant: There's this whole question of being deserving, which I find so terrifying with so much a part of the politicization of the good life. She spent her career theorizing and writing about finding meaning in American life and whom our society decides gets to be included, the citizens. Paul Rand: Lauren Berlant is a professor of English at the University of Chicago. Lauren Berlant: Starting in the 1970s, the image of the good life as an economic good life started losing its traction. Paul Rand: But what if that promise, that you can have the good life if you just work hard enough, is a lie? Tape: To those who know the good life, comes from the moments you live, not the things you own. Tape: What is the good life? It's about being totally alive in every fiber, every thought, every moment. Tape: A great vacation starts with a great airline. Paul Rand: What gets you out of bed in the morning? What motivates you to go to a job you may not love, save up to buy a house or a luxury car? For most Americans it's a desire to attain the quote-unquote “good life.” The mindfulness conspiracy- The Guardian.Without Exception: On the Ordinariness of Violence- Law Review of Books.Affect Theory and the New Age of Anxiety- The New Yorker.Lauren Berlant and Karl Freed to receive Norman Maclean Faculty Award New book explores ‘concept of the ordinary’-100 words at a time.(Episode published November 4, 2019) Recommended: Subscribe to Big Brains on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher and Spotify. ![]() ![]() But Berlant wants to try and reshape things. But Berlant says the Presidency of Donald Trump has completely shattered our understanding of what it means to have a public and a shared connection as citizens. But what if our attachment to that desire is the very thing holding us back? Lauren Berlant is a theorist and English professor at the University of Chicago and the author of “Cruel Optimism” a book about when you're attached to forms of life that fundamentally get in the way of the attachment you brought to them.īerlant has been writing about finding attachment and belonging in America her entire career. For most Americans, the driving force in their personal and public life is a desire to attain the “good life”. That last line is hardly the only observation about the writing process in The Hundreds in fact, there is an entire chapter on the writing life-titled “Writing, Life” 1 -that feels perfectly suited to this newsletter, and that I would love to quote in its entirety. ![]() Writing is a labor of being it needs materials to work with. Sometimes the resonance of a thing builds your strength even though nothing appears to be changing. Most people seem to be in the middle of something they somehow ended up in. Some of my favorites:Ĭollaboration is a meeting of minds that don’t match. Each chapter is a sort of prose poem, and though these can be fairly opaque, they are studded with brilliantly spot-on observations and just brilliant sentences. Where Cruel Optimism is dense and academic, The Hundreds is loose, fast-moving, and experimental (the authors call it “an experiment in keeping up with what’s going on”). ![]()
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